


Clutched My Life and Wished It Kept

by TornThorn



Series: Alone With You [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Abandonment, Angst, Denial of Found Family, Spoilers, Tags to C2Ep55: Duplicity, Tags to C2Ep86: The Cathedral, What is editing? Is is crunchy?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-18 03:13:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21770836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TornThorn/pseuds/TornThorn
Summary: Caduceus muses on the idea of family.(Pink cow man has issues and is sad.)
Series: Alone With You [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1641526
Comments: 2
Kudos: 92





	Clutched My Life and Wished It Kept

**Author's Note:**

> I blame this on criticalrolo, thekgalaxy, and eldritchjackalope. (THEY KNOW WHAT THEY DID.)

Caduceus has always understood why they did it. Why his family left, when the Wildmother called them away. Technically, he understood.

Unfortunately, that has no effect on standing alone in the Grove, a cup of tea gone cold in his hand, surrounded by silence. The plants rustle in the breeze, and the quiet is heavy, like a board piled high with rocks sitting on his chest.

(There is a difference between the people you love going on quests to save your home, and the people you love willfully leaving you. Caduceus isn’t sure he knows where his family falls on that scale anymore.)

And he recognizes that it’s selfish to assume that their deaths would not be the worst thing. It doesn’t change the way his heart feels like it’s being compressed when he pictures them, together somewhere else. Pictures them happy, away from the weight of caring for and worrying about the Grove, away from him. It’s selfish to prefer their deaths to abandonment. It’s selfish to think that none of them responding when he used the abilities he was gifted by the Wildmother to try to speak to them, over the distance, was because they’ve passed on, rather than that they have no interest in responding.

So he stands in the garden, next to the Dorance Family plots, lungs tight, breathing in harsh gasps, trying to find that sense of peace and calm he had as a child, taking his aunt's hand and gleefully leading her out to see his favorite tombstone carvings.

Feeling the watching eyes of the Wildmother has begun to make it worse, which is a problem. Everyone he has ever cared for has dedicated their lives and souls to her, and she has been gentle and kind when they have called upon her for such reassurance. But he has also seen, over and over, that nature is wild and brutal. Death is a natural part of the order. Cats play with their prey before killing them. Horses can run like they were the wind sweeping across the land, but the very act can cause their lungs to bleed and legs to snap, and from that there is no saving them. A god’s idea of morality, of good and evil and what matters, can be very different from a mortal’s. And Caduceus is so very mortal, and he has many years stretching out ahead of him, and he does not enjoy being alone.

Solitude wasn’t an issue, when his family was nearby. It was easy enough to wander off for a day or two so he could hear his own thoughts over the constant noise, secure in the knowledge that they would be there when he came back.

(They weren’t anymore.)

He doesn’t know how to do this. He doesn’t know how to be alone. Is it any surprise that the first group of adventurers that stumble into his Grove asking for assistance, he does everything but physically leap to help? He tells them he senses the Wildmother’s hand in their arrival, he tells himself it’s a sign from his goddess, that it is his turn to take part in the great quest that will result in the Grove being fixed and his family returning.

(Caduceus has no idea when he began lying to himself, only that he has become better at it over the years. Much more convincing.)

And when this company tries to take him in as part of their ramshackle idea of family, he resists. Not overtly, not loudly. Still, he has made the mistake before in trusting that he will not be left behind. It’s easier to hold them at a distance, to perceive them as flawed projects and powerful allies and perceptive idiots and (in at least one case) cracked beyond repair. It’s easy to act wise and push them to do and be what he thinks best, because if he doesn't treat them like family, it won’t feel like family.

(He misses his siblings, his parents, his aunt. He misses them until it aches. He stopped trying to find them years ago.)

Another fight passes, another instance of keeping everyone alive, of coming close to dying himself. They stop a ritual and kill a being punished by its god and confront a king and face a wizard with the cruelest eyes Caduceus has ever seen. And when they’re given rooms, and he lies down to sleep, there is a moment where he wonders if any of his family have scried on him in the years between.

(Did any of them know, did they care, that he has died? That it was at the hands of an ally? Or would they only care that he had left the Grove without a guardian?)

He doesn’t sleep well that night.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from In the Woods Somewhere, by Hozier


End file.
